Cut out: Brexit would put the EU’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions at risk

Too little attention has been paid to the EU’s contribution to tackling climate change by referendum campaigners, says Tim Rayner. The UK has played a major part in shaping carbon reduction policies and has pushed for higher targets in the face of opposition from other member states. If we left the EU, we would no longer have a say in the emissions trading scheme and the progress made across Europe might well falter

Buyer power in U.K. food retailing: a 'first-pass' test

Habtu Weldegebriel, University of Warwick Abstract The potential existence of buyer power in U.K. food retailing has attracted the scrutiny of the U.K.'s anti-trust authorities, culminating in the second of two comprehensive regulatory inquiries in recent years. Such inquiries are authoritative but correspondingly time-consuming and costly. Moreover, detection of buyer power has been dogged by the paucity of reliable evidence of its existence. In this paper, we present a simple theoretical model of oligopsony which delivers quasi-reduced form retailer-producer pricing equations with which the null of perfect competition can be tested using readily available market data. Using a cointegrated vector autoregression, we find empirical results that show the null of perfect competition can be rejected in seven of the nine food products investigated. Though not conclusive on the existence of buyer power, the proposed test offers a means via which the behaviour of the retail-producer price spread is consistent with it. At the very least, it can corroborate the concerns of the anti-trust authorities as to whether buyer power is potentially one source of concern

Effects of intraword and interword spacing on eye movements during reading: Exploring the optimal use of space in a line of text

Two eye movement experiments investigated intra-word spacing (the space between letters within words) and inter-word spacing (the space between words) to explore the influence these variables have on eye movement control during reading. Both variables are important factors in determining the optimal use of space in a line of text, and fonts differ widely in how they employ these spaces. Prior research suggests that the proximity of flanking letters influences the identification of a central letter via lateral inhibition or crowding. If so decrements in intra-word spacing may produce inhibition in word processing. Still other research suggests that increases in intra-word spacing can disrupt the integrity of word units. In English, inter-word spacing has a large influence on word segmentation and is important for saccade target selection. The results indicate interplay between intra and inter word spacing which influence a font’s readability. Additionally, these studies highlight the importance of word segmentation processes and have implications for the nature of lexical processing (serial vs. parallel)

Saccade launch site as a predictor of fixation durations in reading: Comments on Hand, Miellet, O’Donnell, and Sereno (2010).

An important question in research on eye movements in reading is whether word frequency and word predictability have additive or interactive effects on fixation durations. A fair number of studies have reported only additive effects of the frequency and predictability of a target word on reading times on that word, failing to show significant interactions. Recently, however, Hand, Miellet, O'Donnell, and Sereno (see record 2010-19099-001) reported interactive effects in a study that included the distance of the prior fixation from the target word (launch site). They reported that when the saccade into the target word was launched from very near to the word (within 3 characters), the predictability effect was larger for low frequency words, but when the saccade was launched from a medium distance (4-6 characters from the word) the predictability effect was larger for high frequency words. Hand et al. argued for the importance of including launch site in analyses of target word fixation durations. Here we describe several problems with Hand et al.'s use of analyses of variance in which launch site is divided into distinct ordinal levels. We describe a more appropriate way to analyze such data-linear mixed-effect models-and we use this method to show that launch site does not modulate the interaction between frequency and predictability in two other data sets

Market Power in UK Food Retailing: Theory and Evidence from Seven Product Groups

Establishing the presence of market power in food chains has become an increasingly pertinent line of enquiry given the trend towards increasing concentration that has been observed in many parts of the world. This paper presents a theoretical model of price transmission in vertically related markets under imperfect competition. The model delivers a quasi-reduced form representation that is empirically tractable using readily available market data to test for the presence of market power. In particular, we show that the hypothesis of perfect competition can be rejected if shocks to the demand and supply function are significant and correctly signed in price transmission equations. Using a cointegrated vector autoregression, we find empirical results that are consistent with downstream market power in six out of seven food products investigated, supporting both the findings of the UK competition authority's recent investigation in to supermarkets and renewed calls for further scrutiny of supermarket behaviour by the UK's Office of Trading.imperfect competition, Cointegrated VARs, UK food industry, Marketing, D4, L81,

Going beyond two degrees? The risks and opportunities of alternative options

Since the mid-1990s, the aim of keeping climate change within 2 °C has become firmly entrenched in policy discourses. In the past few years, the likelihood of achieving it has been increasingly called into question. The debate around what to do with a target that seems less and less achievable is, however, only just beginning. As the UN commences a two-year review of the 2 °C target, this article moves beyond the somewhat binary debates about whether or not it should or will be met, in order to analyse more fully some of the alternative options that have been identified but not fully explored in the existing literature. For the first time, uncertainties, risks, and opportunities associated with four such options are identified and synthesized from the literature. The analysis finds that the significant risks and uncertainties associated with some options may encourage decision makers to recommit to the 2 °C target as the least unattractive course of action

Evidence for direct control of eye movements during reading.

It is well established that fixation durations during reading vary with processing difficulty, but there are different views on how oculomotor control, visual perception, shifts of attention, and lexical (and higher cognitive) processing are coordinated. Evidence for a one-to-one translation of input delay into saccadic latency would provide a much needed constraint for current theoretical proposals. Here, we tested predictions of such a direct-control perspective using the stimulus-onset delay (SOD) paradigm. Words in sentences were initially masked and, upon fixation, were individually unmasked with a delay (0-ms, 33-ms, 66-ms, 99-ms SODs). In Experiment 1, SODs were constant for all words in a sentence; in Experiment 2, SODs were manipulated on target words, while non-targets were unmasked without delay. In accordance with predictions of direct control, non-zero SODs entailed equivalent increases in fixation durations in both experiments. Yet, a population of short fixations pointed to rapid saccades as a consequence of low-level information at non-optimal viewing positions rather than of lexical processing. Implications of these results for theoretical accounts of oculomotor control are discussed

Interplay of cis and trans mechanisms driving transcription factor binding and gene expression evolution

Noncoding regulatory variants play a central role in the genetics of human diseases and in evolution. Here we measure allele-specific transcription factor binding occupancy of three liver-specific transcription factors between crosses of two inbred mouse strains to elucidate the regulatory mechanisms underlying transcription factor binding variations in mammals. Our results highlight the pre-eminence of cis-acting variants on transcription factor occupancy divergence. Transcription factor binding differences linked to cis-acting variants generally exhibit additive inheritance, while those linked to trans-acting variants are most often dominantly inherited. Cis-acting variants lead to local coordination of transcription factor occupancies that decay with distance; distal coordination is also observed and may be modulated by long-range chromatin contacts. Our results reveal the regulatory mechanisms that interplay to drive transcription factor occupancy, chromatin state, and gene expression in complex mammalian cell states.We thank the CRUK—CI Genomics, BRU, and Bioinformatics Cores for technical assistance and the EMBL-EBI systems team for management of computational resources. This research was supported by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (E.S.W., D.T., J.C.M., P.F.), Cancer Research UK (B.M.S., T.F.R., F.C., C.F., A.R., D.T.O.), the BOLD ITN (B.M.S.), Darwin Fellowship (A.K.), the Wellcome Trust (WT202878/B/16/Z, WT108749/Z/15/Z) (P.F.), (WT202878/A/16/Z) (D.T.O), (WT095606) (A.C.F.-S) and (WT098051) (P.F., D.T.O.), EMBO Long-term (ALTF1518-2012) and Advanced Fellowships (aALTF1672-2014) (E.S.W.), and by the European Research Council (award 615584) and EMBO Young Investigator Programme (D.T.O.)

Molecular MRI in the Earth's Magnetic Field Using Continuous Hyperpolarization of a Biomolecule in Water

In this work, we illustrate a method to continuously hyperpolarize a biomolecule, nicotinamide, in water using parahydrogen and signal amplification by reversible exchange (SABRE). Building on the preparation procedure described recently by Truong et al. [ J. Phys. Chem. B, 2014, 118, 13882-13889 ], aqueous solutions of nicotinamide and an Ir-IMes catalyst were prepared for low-field NMR and MRI. The 1H-polarization was continuously renewed and monitored by NMR experiments at 5.9 mT for more than 1000 s. The polarization achieved corresponds to that induced by a 46 T magnet (P = 1.6 × 10-4) or an enhancement of 104. The polarization persisted, although reduced, if cell culture medium (DPBS with Ca2+ and Mg2+) or human cells (HL-60) were added, but was no longer observable after the addition of human blood. Using a portable MRI unit, fast 1H-MRI was enabled by cycling the magnetic field between 5 mT and the Earth's field for hyperpolarization and imaging, respectively. A model describing the underlying spin physics was developed that revealed a polarization pattern depending on both contact time and magnetic field. Furthermore, the model predicts an opposite phase of the dihydrogen and substrate signal after one exchange, which is likely to result in the cancelation of some signal at low field

The EU: towards adequate, coherent and coordinated climate action?

This chapter takes stock of what we have learned from the contributions gathered in this Handbook and reflects on the EU’s ability to deliver on increasingly ambitious climate policy objectives. After summarizing key messages of each chapter, the chapter brings out a number of cross-cutting themes, related to key on-going challenges facing effective EU climate policy. These include the need to raise and appropriately direct significant new finance, the need for democratic but also decisive decision making, the power of ‘incumbents’, the adequacy of relying on technological fixes for emission reduction, and the geopolitical dimension. We end with an assessment of the prospects for EU climate policy and politics as the 2020s develop, in particular the extent to which crises can be managed to allow a continued or even enhanced focus on climate change. We highlight growing impacts from extreme events as one on-going crisis that will need a more concerted response.publishedVersio